So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  DAVID WEDDLE

  In season two, I believe it’s “Valley of Darkness,” Ron did a rewrite of our script on that, like a polish, but he added a scene that turned out to be critical, though at the time it was just meant to be a slice-of-life moment. If you remember, Kara Thrace finds the Cylon Raider and goes back to Caprica, and she hooks up with Helo and there’s a scene where they’re on the run and they go back to her old apartment. Ron wrote that scene, conceived of it and everything. They wander into the wreckage of her apartment, and there’s a painting on a canvas leaning against the wall of a giant mandala, and Helo says, “Who painted that?” And she says, “I did.” Then a little bit later, she puts a record on the stereo and he says, “Who’s that? What music is that?” And she says, “That’s my father.” Ron put those vital elements in, but not with any conscious idea that they were going to play out somehow. It was really meant as a kind of enigmatic little snippet or view into Kara Thrace’s life, and a slice-of-life moment of these two lost people on this planet just sort of hanging out in what was once her apartment. That’s all it was.

  MICHAEL O’HALLORAN

  (editor, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  I don’t think it was intended, but that painting became such a huge part of the show. That was one of the great things; talk about a show building itself organically. That was one of those great moments. When I first got on the show, Michael Rymer asked me what I thought the show was about and I said, “It’s 9/11 every single day to these people.” In this episode, Kara has that moment where she says, “You know, after the attack, I realized”—I’m just paraphrasing—“I didn’t care about another toilet that didn’t work or the bad view of the parking lot outside.” There she’s lighting up her father’s cigar that she finds in a little cigar box there. She just put on her father’s flight jacket. She’s just having that memory, and then she starts playing her father’s music. It was just really, to me, everything that the show was.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  In season three, Brad and I are writing “Rapture,” and Ron says the phrase “the Temple of the Five.” We did a draft and then he was giving us notes on the rewrite, and he said, “What I would like is for Kara to be able to interpret something on the temple that no one else can.” Because this was playing into his idea that she would be like a guardian angel. So he said, “Maybe there’s some writing in an ancient language, nobody else can understand what it means, and Kara looks at it and can read it right away, and has no idea why.” That was Ron’s initial pitch, though he was just throwing it out as an idea. Brad and I mulled that over. It seemed a little too awkward or stilted if you did it exactly that way, but we knew what Ron wanted.

  So we just start all of a sudden back to that scene in “Valley of Darkness,” and the painting of the mandala, and thought that would be a more enigmatic, mysterious thing to tie to Kara Thrace. What if her mandala was on the temple? So we pitched that to Ron. He goes, “I love it. Do it.” So we did it. Then of course at the end Helo says to Kara, “Do you have that picture of your old apartment?” And she pulls a snapshot out of a box, and he compares it to the mandala on the temple and says, “How did you paint a mandala that was on a five-thousand-year-old temple?” And she has no answer for him. So we wrote those scenes, and Ron loved that.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  David and Bradley have a lot to do with the way the Starbuck arc ultimately went. I was interested in the early Starbuck, the fighter pilot with the screwup, tragic backstory. The officer who would disobey orders at times, who would take a swing at her superior and yet worshiped Adama and had been mentored by him and then had been betrayed by him and vice versa. The betrayals involved in that relationship. I was interested in her relationship with Apollo, what that was about, and then ultimately with Sam Anders. I really liked the whole arc of her sleeping with Apollo and then marrying Sam. But they were really into her arc, and sometimes there’s a point as a showrunner where you do kind of realize, “This one’s better in your hands. You’ll do better with this piece than I will.”

  BRADLEY THOMPSON

  (producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])

  Katee was absolutely fearless about going to all these horrible, emotional places. The attitude was, “Can we make this character the most infuriating person ever?” Because she’s totally self-sabotaging and tremendously talented. But a really, really big heart. All of these things that are fighting within her. Then we tried to come up with why would that be. What was her freight damage, so to speak, that brought her to this spot? It was a pretty incredible journey, especially if you’re going to turn her into Christ or something that comes back from the dead and leads you to the promised land and then vanishes … I thought that was pretty cool.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  We didn’t really know how we were going to pay things off yet, because it was such an organic process on Battlestar, and I was up for the preproduction in the first couple days of shooting on “Rapture” and “The Eye of Jupiter.” Katee Sackhoff came up to me and said, “So what’s the deal with the mandala? What does that mean?” Of course I didn’t know yet, and I said, “Well, we’re still developing that. It’s kind of premature to talk about it.” I was tap-dancing, and Katee said, “You know, I think that in light of seeing this mandala, and in light of knowing I have some other destiny”—because Ron had talked to her about that—she said, “Maybe there’s something in my past. Maybe there’s an event in my past that seems innocuous, never seemed important, but now in light of my mandala on the temple, I interpret it in a whole different way.” So I said, “That’s a really interesting idea, Katee.”

  I came back to the writers’ room in L.A., and the story up on the board for the episode that they were going to have Brad and I write. In it, Lee and Kara are orbiting this planet with a lot of cloud cover, and while they’re doing their missions, they talk about their fraught relationship. I said, “Well, we kind of have done that over and over. Can’t we try to advance it in some way? And here’s what Katee Sackhoff has to say.” And I told them, and Ron just grabbed that and ran with it and said, “Yes. Let’s do that.” Then we got the idea of the cloud around the planet starting to look to her like the mandala, and then this whole theme of her always tiptoeing up to the edge of death. You know this might be a vehicle for exploring that.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  They were struggling with it and I wasn’t in on the break. Then they pitched it, “You know, it just feels unsatisfying that in the end, she’s just going to figure out a way to beat this thing. She’s just going to come out smelling like a rose like she always does; it just feels like it’s about nothing, and we had an idea. What if we killed her?” I was like, “What?” They’re like, “We kill her. She dies. But we bring her back a few episodes later and she’s been resurrected and she’s some kind of guardian angel or prophet. We feed her into the larger mythology in some way; we shock the audience and really take her out of the show for a while. We let Lee and Adama and everyone deal with the ramifications of her death.” I was really surprised and even said, “That’s really unexpected.”

  DAVID WEDDLE

  So we got the idea as it is in the show “Maelstrom,” of her being drawn down into the mandala, and having a 2001 sort of vision and then pulling out again. So as we developed that, Ron said, “Why does she have to pull out? Maybe she goes all the way in and she dies.” Which was an incredible, radical idea none of us would have ever dared to think of, and of course it plays into all the mythologies that’s great about where Battlestar evolved to, and myths throughout every culture. Of course, most prominently Christianity, there is in every civilization with this death and rebirth, and a rebirth that offers a vision forward for the human race. So Kara was starting to jell as a character like that.

  KATEE SACKHOFF

  They didn’t send the script out first and I got this cryptic phone call from Ron and David in my trailer. They were like, “So we want to talk to you about something. You’ve done nothing w
rong.” In my mind I’m thinking, “I totally did something wrong.” “We’re going to kill you, but we’re going to bring you back, so don’t worry. You’re not going to be you. Don’t worry about it. Everyone’s going to think you’re dead. We’re going to take your name out of the credits. You’re going to go home. We’re not telling anyone anything.” I’m like, “Okay.…” So I went to Mexico for a couple of episodes, but the problem was that I was lying to everyone.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  This was one of the stupidest things that David and I did in the entire run of the show. You’re right at the cusp of social media and the internet starting to ferret out spoilers from shows. Various plotlines are getting blown online for the first time. This is becoming a thing that none of us had ever had to deal with before. Our feeling was this was only going to work if the audience thinks we mean it, and the characters mean it. We’ll take her name out of the main credits, we want this to be a shock. Katee knows she’s coming back and we swear her to secrecy, so then, of course, it just becomes a fiasco and Katee is telling everyone she’s leaving the show. The script comes out and she’s dead.

  KATEE SACKHOFF

  I’m like this child; I tell my mom, because I had to tell someone. My mom’s on set. The crew were like, “So sorry about Katee.” My mom’s like, “I know. She’ll be okay. She’ll land on her feet.”

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  We knew we were going to bring her back, so we wrote two endings for that script. One is that she doesn’t die. That’s the one that we circulated, because, first of all, we wanted it to be a surprise. Second of all, we didn’t want to raise concern with the cast thinking, “Oh my God, they’re killing her off. What are they doing?” Well, somehow the real draft got leaked, and there was just chaos. Everybody thought, “You’re killing off Katee?” Leading the charge was Eddie Olmos. He was like, “This is preposterous. This is wrong. She’s one of the signature characters in the show. What the hell are you guys doing?” Her mother even called, saying, “Why are you killing her? How could you possibly…?” Of course we had to explain what was going on, and come clean about everything. But it was astonishing how militant Eddie got about keeping her on the show.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Eddie puts the script down after he reads it, and says, “The show will never be the same.”

  KATEE SACKHOFF

  Finally I was like, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m telling Eddie.” So I called him and then he told everyone. We were doing the Maxim photo shoot and he stood up on something and he told the entire cast that I wasn’t really dead, and I felt like such an asshole.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  While this is happening in Vancouver, David and I are getting calls in Los Angeles from the set saying, “They’re really upset. You don’t understand, people are freaking out that you’re killing Starbuck.” We’re like, “Hey, it’s working. Nobody’s going to know. This is going to be the greatest prank of all time.” A little time goes by and I get a phone call. Eddie’s pissed, walking around saying, “This is the death of the show.” It just spiraled completely out of control and we’re like, “We’re just trying to keep a secret on a TV show. We didn’t want to upset anybody.”

  KATEE SACKHOFF

  I don’t even think we made it a week.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  It was just a matter of days and we were like, “Okay, call it off. Tell everybody. We’re sorry.”

  DAVID WEDDLE

  We did a break where we talked about her visions in the clouds before she “died,” and everything was pitched out from Lee and Kara have sex on the hangar deck and all the other characters are in bleachers. Every kind of bizarre thing was thrown up on the board, and then Brad and I went off to write it, and it just seemed too gimmicky and over-the-top. But one of the things that had been talked about in that, and that I felt very strongly, I think I brought it up, was her mother.

  Obviously Ron laid in this whole thing of the abusive mother. He never came out with why the mother abused her, who she really was. So we just decided to center on that. That was going to be the vision. It’s going to be the mother, and we came up with the idea of maybe it was the last time she saw her mother. So we wrote the first version of it. She goes to see her mother and her mother’s had a stroke and cannot talk, and it is Kara Thrace just venting toward her mother who had abused her. In the middle of it, tears start to come out of her mother’s eyes, and she goes, “Don’t. Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about. Remember that? I do.” Then she does this whole venting and she runs out, and it was the last time she saw her mother. So we wrote that in a draft and Ron said, “This is the best script you guys have ever written for me.” And I was overcome with emotion about that, and thought, “Wow. That was an incredible affirmation.” Then Michael Nankin came on to direct it. He’d directed “Scar.” Brad and I were already really close with Michael, and loved collaborating with him. The three of us became a kind of team on Battlestar. But I didn’t love him this day. All of a sudden he wanted a conference call for the script that Ron loved better than any script we’ve ever written, and Michael Nankin starts saying, “I don’t understand the relationship between Kara and her mother. I don’t understand why we’re doing this flashback. Blah, blah, blah.” Ron defended our version for a long time, and then suddenly turned and said, “Maybe Michael’s right. Maybe we need to see the lion roar one more time. Maybe she goes to see her mother after the day that her mother has gotten a notice from a doctor that she’s dying of cancer, and Kara discovers this. Then we can get the back-and-forth with the mother and understand the relationship. Then maybe that can show us … maybe you can tie in the mandala and her cosmic destiny into that.”

  Then Michael and Ron said, “So what do you guys think?” And we had like four days before prep started, or three days I think it was. I said, “Well, it all sounds great but I don’t know how we do this in three days.…” Michael Nankin laughed and said, “Oh, you guys can do it. You wrote ‘Scar.’” So Brad and I, as we often did trying to solve Battlestar episodes, walked the entire backlot of Universal, through the Western street, the New York street, talking about this, and came up with a bunch of bad ideas of how to tie the mandala in. None of them were good, and Ron then pitched his ideas, none of which were good. I didn’t sleep that whole night. I felt like I had a fever, and suddenly hit on the idea of the mandala being in a scrapbook, because my mother kept scrapbooks on me, and I thought, “What if the mandala’s in the scrapbook and she painted it when she was like two or three and didn’t even remember this painting, and her mother had it and shows it to her?”

  So we went in to pitch that to Ron, and he said, “That’s fantastic.” And we had more discussions about the mother, too, with Ron, and he said, “Maybe it’s, you know, like with my parents, they always felt that I was special, that I had special abilities. Therefore nothing I ever did was good enough. Maybe she had a feeling about her daughter. She knew she was special, but the way she communicated it was kind of fucked up, because she had been in the military and been in combat, and had all these demons. She knew something true about her daughter, but communicated it in a very dysfunctional way.” So that’s how “Maelstrom” came together. It wasn’t preplanned. It all kind of sprung from this scene that Ron wrote in season two that had these clues and these elements that were potentially powerful. The way we started to write the show was to look back at what’s happened and build on that, or expand on that, or go to the door of a scene that had certain clues in it.

  Then of course in the last season, they said to us, “What do you want to write for the last episode?” Because we had been so intimately involved all the way through, they let us kind of choose what we wanted to do, and I said, “I want to do her father in that very same scene in her apartment she plays the music, you hear her father’s music. Now let’s see the father. Let’s complete Kara Thrace’s story and let’s use the father to do the final stepping-stone of her destiny.” And Ron said,
“Great. Go for it.”

  So of course we’re talking about “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and that’s what it became, and Mark Verheiden had the idea of the father not as a … You know, we started with flashbacks, the way we had done kind of Socrata Thrace, like see flashbacks, and then what we’d done on “Act of Contrition.” A series of flashbacks to sort of fill in the father’s story. But Mark said, “What if it’s a ghost story, like he’s playing a piano in the bar and you don’t know he’s not real. Only Kara sees him.” We loved that idea, and that was a brilliant idea of Mark’s, and then Ron really helped with the notes of the music. The notes of the music would correspond to the coordinates for Earth. Ron came up with that.

  It was this wonderful wedding of the cosmic destiny of the character, the spiritual dimension of the character, to her personal story. So by the end of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” you have all of Kara Thrace’s story from the beginning to the end. So that’s an example to me of the whole organic process of writing Battlestar Galactica, which I think was one of the real keys to it being such a great show.

  Not a lot of character background was available on Lieutenant (eventually Captain) Karl “Helo” Agathon (an electronic countermeasures officer), as he was a character that wasn’t supposed to go beyond the Battlestar Galactica miniseries. For a variety of reasons, though, he was kept alive, his story unfolding on Cylon-occupied Caprica, where he is paired with Grace Park’s Sharon Valerii, unaware of what she really is. Like much of the young cast of the show, the Canadian-born actor in the days prior to the miniseries had spent much of his acting time appearing in small feature film parts and guest-star appearances on television.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  The character of Helo was a really grounded guy. This sounds a little corny, but the everyman soldier feeling I got from Helo, that he was just trying to have a family and get on with some version of life, whatever you can have in this situation, is something I really enjoyed. And Tahmoh is a great actor and was always great to work with, but it’s good to have a character in there that is the grounded guy you could go to if you wanted an honest answer about where things are really at.